Hi. This is my 'locale' output: LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME=ru_RU.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL= As you can see, I am using en_US locale for all except of time (I don't like AM/PM time format). The problem is that KDE using en_US for date and time too. I understand that I can adjust date and time format in KDE System Settings. But shouldn't it be read from LC_TIME variable? Is there some reasons for current behaviour? Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Set LC_TIME different to other locale variables 2. Start KDE Actual Results: The time format is taken from some other of locale variables. Expected Results: The time format is that was set in item (1.).
The reason for current behavior is that KDE does not use the GNU libc as its locale system. GNU libc (or its forks) is the system C library on many free operating systems; LC_* variables are settings for its locale system. Long time ago (I don't know the exact historical context), KDE decided to create its own locale system, which it has kept up to today. At the moment, there is no true link between GNU libc locale system and KDE locale system. In KDE 3 this was quite apparent, by user having to select explicitly a KDE locale on first login, regardless of what LC_* variables were. In KDE 4 a small compromise was introduced, to automatically select a KDE locale based on the language and country from LC_* variables. But it still holds that, if the user manually selects a particular language and country in the KDE System Settings, LC_* variables are ignored thereafter. Some larger changes in KDE locale system are planned for "KDE 5" (approximatelly speaking, there will be no thing called exactly this), but _from what I understood so far, they don't include extending the use of GNU libc locale settings.